OCEANSIDE – In the beginning, they lived on unpaved streets without electricity or plumbing in their homes and their children attended a segregated school.

CRISSY PASCUAL / Union-Tribune

Brothers Pete (right) and Rex Magaņa told stories about their family as they prepared six-foot-long poster boards of family pictures for tomorrow's reunion in Heritage Park.

But members of the Magaña family flourished and tomorrow celebrate 100 years in Oceanside.

Pete Magaña, one of the reunion organizers, expects at least 80 Magañas at the celebration in Heritage Park, along with half that many people with other surnames and ethnicities related to the Magañas by marriage.

The site was chosen for the reunion, open only to the family, Pete Magaña said, because it contains a lot of Oceanside history.

“And we're part of that history,” he said.

All the Magañas– from Refugio, 80, the oldest, to Zak Magaña Montero, 17 months, the youngest, will be wearing Magaña 100th anniversary knit shirts.

It was 1906 when Atenogenes Magaña, born in Galeana, Michoacán, Mexico, arrived in Oceanside.

His sons, Refugio and Pete, 78, don't know what brought him here as a teenager, but they know it cost him 6 cents to cross the border legally from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas.

Atenogenes farmed his whole life.

He worked on land on Dixie Street and on property now covered by the Elks Lodge and Center City Golf Course, growing celery, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans and sweet peas.

Sometimes, his sons missed school to help with the harvest.

Pete and Refugio, known as Ref, talked about the family Thursday as they prepared six-foot-long poster boards of family pictures for the reunion.

One poster titled “a Patriotic Family” shows Magañas and their extended family in uniform from World War II through the current conflict in Iraq. Pete and Ref said they hoped a grandnephew by marriage, Joel Graber, will get back from Okinawa intime for the gathering.

The reunion will feature one poster containing a family tree painstakingly put together by Pete and Ref's niece, Kathy Magaña Herritt, a former school counselor.

Predating the Magañas' arrival in Oceanside, it goes back to an ancestor, Librado, who lived in Mexico in the mid-1800s.

His son, Atenogenes, married Belaria Nares, from another pioneer Oceanside family, also from Michoacán, but from a far-away community, Purépero. They had not met before coming to Oceanside.

Atenogenes and Belaria had seven children – six boys and a girl. Three, Esperanza, Steve and Ray, are deceased. Ref, Pete, Paul and Lupe are alive. First, the family lived in a little house on Archer Street on what later became Sterling Homes, a military housing project, and then moved to San Diego Street.

Pete showed pictures of the house sitting by itself – the area now is totally developed – on a dirt roadway. Ref added that there was no plumbing or electricity. And the few scattered homes had outhouses.

Hispanic children were not allowed in regular classrooms but were required to go to the Americanization school for first through fourth grades.

A classic building by famed architect Irving Gill, the school at Center Avenue and Division Street, still stands and has been refurbished to function as a community center in the nearby Crown Heights neighborhood.

The youngsters transferred to the old Horne Street School later.

Magañas went to the old St. Mary's Church, a wooden chapel now relocated to their neighborhood, but downtown at the time.

When World War II broke out, older brother Steve and Ref were drafted.

Ref hadn't yet finished Oceanside High School, but he got his diploma when he came back from serving with Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines.

Pete was drafted to serve in Korea.

Ray served in Lebanon and Lupe in Panama. Paul did not see military service because of a speech impediment.

In 1961, Pete, in retail sales for 32 years, built his own well-tended home from scratch for $10,000 in the same Eastside neighborhood where he grew up.

Ref, a painter for 42 years, also built his own home for the same price and remembers when his loan payments of $57 a month were considered exorbitant.

Also in 1961, Pete founded the local chapter of the American GI Forum, a primarily Latino veterans group that holds fundraisers every year to provide scholarships for needy students.

At first, Ref remembers, the group sold tamales – lots of them.

Now, it makes money from mariachi concerts and expects to give nine scholarships of $500 each this fall.

Though the Eastside community has had its share of gang woes, Pete and Ref say they never had trouble with any of their children, who preferred being in the school band or playing on a softball team.

All the brothers were able to send their children to college.

The younger generation of Magañas is trying to carry on that tradition, not just with members of the family but with children of the community.

Pete's youngest daughter, Rosemary, 37, said that as a teacher at Ditmar School in Oceanside, she's trying to instill that love of education in her fourth-graders, many of them, like her dad and uncles, the children of immigrants.

And a reunion is apt to be repeated next year when Ref's son, Andy, a high school band director in the Capistrano Unified School District, expects to take his musicians to play in a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York.